Schools Alone Cannot Save Children from Economic Inequality.

Aug 08, 2020by Staffin Education
Public policy can ameliorate child poverty without being revolutionary.  However, programs need to be redesigned and targeted to alleviate instability, privation and misery for the more than 2 million children living in America’s poorest families.  Child poverty overall was reduced in the decade between 1995 and 2005, but during that same period, the number children living in the deepest poverty rose from 2.2 to 2.6 million children.  These are the conclusions of a new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) defines deep poverty as families…READ MORE: https://northdenvernews.com/schools-alone-cannot-save-children-from-economic-inequality/
News from Colorado‘s top news source

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/CherryCreekNews

Aug 08, 2020by Staffin Education
Public policy can ameliorate child poverty without being revolutionary.  However, programs need to be redesigned and targeted to alleviate instability, privation and misery for the more than 2 million children living in America’s poorest families.  Child poverty overall was reduced in the decade between 1995 and 2005, but during that same period, the number children living in the deepest poverty rose from 2.2 to 2.6 million children.  These are the conclusions of a new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) defines deep poverty as families living below half of the federal poverty level—below $14,000 per year for a family of four. Who are these children? “Children living in deep poverty are a diverse group…. In 2016, 37 percent were white, 30 percent were Latino, 23 percent were Black, and 6 percent were Asian; 45 percent lived in suburban areas, 32 percent in urban areas, and 11 percent in rural areas; 51 percent lived in a single-mother family, 37 percent in a married-couple family, and 6 percent in a single-father family; 16 percent lived in a family where someone had a work-limiting disability; and 89 percent were U.S. citizens and 31 percent lived in a family with a non-citizen.”This subject is rarely discussed in the education press, where the assumption for decades has been that, if teachers work hard and children study, public schools can, by themselves, provide enough opportunity to enable our society’s poorest children to surmount the obstacles posed by their families’ circumstances. But a mass of research (here, here and here) documents instead that schools serving concentrations of children living in the poorest communities are unable to accomplish this goal. Standardized test scores correlate in the aggregate with family and neighborhood income. The fact that 114,085 students enrolled in New York City’s public schools were homeless at some point during the 2018-2019 school year—10 percent of the district’s 1.1 million students—is an overwhelming challenge for the children and their families. Their homelessness and lack of access to the basics most of us take for granted is a problem which their public schools alone cannot solve.The CBPP researchers examine child poverty data from the decade following the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996—the welfare reform bill that “ended welfare as we know it” without ending child poverty: “The decade from 1995 to 2005 is the most suitable period for examining the effects of the 1996 law that replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which had chiefly served families with little or no earnings, with TANF, which offers less assistance and includes stricter work requirements and time limits… We estimate that the share of children in deep poverty rose from 3.1 percent to 3.5 percent between 1995 and 2005… Children in single-mother families, who make up the majority of TANF participants, showed a large increase in deep poverty rates from 1995 to 2005, from 5.4 percent to 7.4 percent… The number of families served by AFDC/TANF fell by more than half from 1995-2005, largely due to the 1996 law’s policies taking away cash assistance when a parent didn’t meet a work requirement, imposing time limits, erecting access barriers that made it hard for families to apply for and be approved for benefits…. In 1995, AFDC lifted 2.8 million children out of deep poverty.  In 2005, TANF lifted only 700,000 children out of deep poverty, and in 2016 it lifted only 300,000.”What are the other government polic..

Colorado News